Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2021/Summer/105/Section 06/Margaret Harris

Overview
Margaret Harris was born on November 18th, 1877, and was an American tailoress based in Athens, Georgia. Harris was interviewed for the Federal Writers Project on December 9th, 1938 at age 60.

Childhood
Born on November 18th, 1877, in Clarke County, Georgia, Margaret Harris was the daughter of a paper-mill worker and a homemaker. As a child, Harris attended school near a paper mill at Old Hall alongside a hundred local children. Customary to the times, to earn extra money she became a child worker, sorting rags and folding paper bags at the paper mill after school for 50 cents a month. Despite the hardships however, Harris recounts the time as enjoyable, a great deal of her childhood memories made at the mill- incidents where she aided in mischief such as hiding tobacco being commonplace antics for her.

Dumb Supper
As a young girl, Harris was greatly interested in a tradition performed by other local girls in hopes of marriage called, 'dumb suppers.' During a dumb supper, two girls would cook a meal and set a table for four specifically with their right hands, completely silent for the entire duration of the 'spell.' The preparations were done 'backwards' in every aspect- chairs turned backwards, tables set wrong- and several  specific table settings were placed alongside the food, a Bible and a bottle of alcohol. Once completed by twelve, the wind would supposedly blow and men would arrive to eat: If a man picked up the Bible, they were deemed a good husband, and if they picked up the bottle, they were deemed a bad choice and a sure drunkard. Should no man show, a girl was "doomed to die an old maid."

Alongside a female friend, Harris conducted her own, 'dumb supper,' one night, which arouse the attention of two local boys who had been fishing nearby and spotted light in her kitchen. Intent on playing their own tricks on the girls, the boys walked into Harris's home, "picked up the bottle(s) and walked out," scaring the two to complete silence for the rest of the night.

First Marriage
At sixteen she met her first husband, Jack, at a large picnic and was married to him in around three months. She recalls his proposal occurring on a trip with a group of girls and boys to "the old Beaverdam church to one of their footwashings," and being married shortly afterwards. When Jack died in 1907, a saddened Harris returned to her parents and worked at the Climax Hosiery Mill for several months. In 1908, she began working at Mr. Smith’s tailoring shop where she was taught the general trade by several Bohemian tailors. After five years of work with Smith, Harris set up her own shop alongside a close friend, Katie Richmond.

Second Marriage
During the period after her first husband had died and she began learning the tailoring trade, Harris grew close to one of the boys who had come to her dumb supper years before, a present widower himself. Harris defined her second husband as "a great teaser," at one point playing a trick on her by spreading the news that they would be married on her sister's wedding day in a joint union- This did not occur however, and they married in 1913. Harris’s husband ran a barber store alongside her tailoring, and after moving together to Nacoochee Avenue in Athens, they became a staple part of the community in their respective shops. They had no children and after Richmond died, Harris ran the tailoring store presumably until her own death.

Child Labor
Prior to the American Industrial Revolution, many children in the United States commonly worked alongside their parents in agricultural labor. The “economic product” extracted from children was facilitated to directly benefit their parents in securing better standards of living, current and for the future, as almost all of a child’s profit would go to their parent(s). Entering the 1800’s, children began finding more work in the textiles industry, “constituting 50 percent of the work force in cotton mills with 16 or more employees, as well as 41 percent of workers in wool mills, and 24 percent in paper mills.” While child labor was prominent for the several centuries before the 20th, it seems it was the general shift of cultural norm upon entering the 20th century in which the practice saw its decline. Laws often did very little to change working conditions for children in the factories, but it was the push towards educating that separated them from the work force.

Women in the Workforce
Entering the Industrial Revolution, the role of women began to change drastically. Originally existing solely within the domestic sphere- confined to the home to raise children and rarely educated- the Industrial Revolution allowed women to enter the workforce for the first time and expand their repertoire. Though a large portion remained within the textile industry in their new jobs as, “acceptable occupations for working women were limited to factory labor or domestic work,” women were finally able to try their hand at manual labor separate from the home and question their longstanding and rigid societal restrictions. This period also introduced women’s suffrage to the cultural atmosphere, a platform that newly working women began to stand on to largely advocate for their own rights. Many young women now sought opportunities previously denied to them such as life without children and living single as the barriers previously defining them began to fall.